Impact of Sentence-length on the Readability of Web for Blind Users

Abstract

This research investigates how the length of sentence impacts on the readability of the web for blind users and explores the appropriateness of the range of sentence to make the web content readable and understandable. Readability on the web is a challenging task for blind users because blind users rely on a screen reader to read the text with a speech synthesizer and they often experience difficulties in re-tracking the beginning of the sentence as the screen reader does not read it back. This research assessed if the length of a sentence affects the readability of the web in terms of workload for the blind users, and if so, what would be the appropriate sentence length to make the web content readable and understandable. An experiment was performed with twenty-one participants and employing a within-subject design for assigned conditions to the participants. A one-way repeated measure ANOVA was used to find out the significance of variance among the five prototypes used. The researcher also applied a comprehension test to indicate whether the users understand the content of the prototype to investigate the appropriate length of the sentence. The finding reveals that there is a significant impact of sentence length on the readability of the web for blind users. The majority of participants performed better in prototype B which had 16-20 word-length in a sentence. Since participants needed less mental and temporal demand, they had less frustration that resulted in better performance in prototype B. The limitations of the research are that the participants were not the actual blind users; instead, they were blindfolded during the experiment. This study suggests that 16-20-word length in a sentence can be appropriate for the blind user to perform readability on the web without much workload.